Should your company do its part by joining the virtualization bandwagon?

Could virtualizing your company’s servers actually be part of your patriotic duty? It may seem a little far-fetched at first glance, but let’s take a deeper look at national trends and the important take-aways from recent national political campaigns that drew a bead on our country’s most pressing problems: a teetering economy, our alarming dependence on foreign oil, and a growing need to address environmental concerns such as global warming.

Is there something IT professionals can do that has the potential of addressing this triple threat of social, economic and environmental ills? The answer could be virtualization. Proven technologies that allow a single server to take on a variety of unrelated tasks that would normally require the use of multiple dedicated servers offer some obvious benefits in the areas of cost savings and efficiency. Can those benefits also translate into improved fiscal performance, reduced consumption of energy resources and a lower carbon footprint? The consensus seems to be in the affirmative.

In fact, these are among the reasons Gartner Group recently anointed virtualization as the No. 1 strategic technology for 2009, topping trendier tech topics such as Business Intelligence (#2), Cloud Computing (#3), Green IT (#4), and Unified Communications (#5). In his blog on the unveiling of this year’s Top 10 list, Gartner’s David Cearly cited virtualization’s “significant potential to reduce IT costs” as the primary business driver, noting that widespread IT belt-tightening in 2009 would prompt popular server virtualization technologies to be augmented by an uptick in virtualization techniques applied to storage and client devices.

"This is about the Internet. Everything on the Internet is encrypted. This is not a BlackBerry-only issue. If they can't deal with the Internet, they should shut it off." -- RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis